Shawn Fowlerhttp://www.shawnfowler.com
Tue, 07 Jan 2014 04:50:45 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1The New Evolutionhttp://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/the-new-evolution/
http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/the-new-evolution/#respondTue, 07 Jan 2014 04:50:45 +0000http://www.shawnfowler.com/?p=70We are drowning in a sea of opportunity. Every day, every one of us in the Western world is presented with an array of choices unimaginable by anyone in any time before. It’s staggering. Want a new pair of shoes? Just buy them. Hungry? Pick up the phone. You can have Mexican food, Indian food, Thai food, Chinese, Japanese, Southwest, Southwest/Japanese fusion, whatever you want. How tall is Lebron James? When did A Charlie Brown Christmas first air? How many atoms are there in a drop of water? Anything, anything you want to know is just a few clicks away. The last twenty years of the twentieth century brought about change on a level that humanity has yet to comprehend. Like a surfer caught in a breaking wave, we’re too busy going with the flow to fully assess exactly what is going on.

But one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Many of the behaviors and instincts that brought our species through the first 99% of our evolution are no longer valid in our modern ecosystem. Specifically, the drive toward acquisition, which was so important to the survival and progress of the species, no longer serves us. Instead, in this age of abundance, another skill is emerging to draw the line between the fit and the failed: Self-regulation.

We are designed to thrive in times of scarcity. The most obvious example is diet. We seek out high calorie foods full of fat and carbohydrates. We crave that marbled piece of steak, the buttery baked potato, the cookie, the chocolate cake. Our brains evolved to flood our system with dopamine when we consume these foods because they will keep us alive. They’ve got the calories necessary to carry us through several days of hunting in a rough winter. And that system has served us well. However, we don’t live in that time of scarcity anymore. You can find 15 kinds of chocolate cake at the grocery store. Many Americans eat meat at every meal of every day. The problem is no longer the acquisition of those calorie-rich foods, but rather the ability to deny their consumption in order to avoid diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases of abundance.

The curse of abundance goes beyond diet. In fact, it may actually be far worse when it comes to information. Take, for instance, education. Much of the American educational system is focused on the acquisition of information. The system was designed in a time where access to information was scarce. If you wanted to learn something, you had to acquire it from a somewhat expensive and hard to find book, or you had to learn it from someone who already knew it. And so our educational system was designed around these two troves of information: The Teacher, and The Book. Since you were going to have limited access to these two items, you’d better do everything you could to memorize all of the data they provided. However, that’s not the reality we live in today. How many phone numbers do you know by heart? What is your grandmother’s birthday? What’s her address? Don’t know? It’s OK. You don’t have to. You can simply look it up in your phone.

Access to information is still a problem, but not in the way that it once was. Instead of having to hunt and peck for the little nuggets of information we find in the world around us, we are faced with the dilemma of parsing the the unstoppable fire hose of data blasting us at every second of every day. Left unchecked, the drive to acquire more information leads to a sort of digital diabetes, whereby constant exposure to new information leads to an inability to fully process anything. Bombardment of data destroys meaning, destroys significance.

The solution is better filters. The ability to resist the urge to check your email, to read your tweets, to google that tidbit of trivia in the middle of dinner – these will increasingly be what separates the successful from the unsuccessful. When you have access to everything all the time, the key survival mechanism ceases to be the ability to acquire information, but instead the ability to ignore the information that doesn’t matter. Even more importantly, the ability to suppress your natural urge to satisfy that need for the dopamine hit. Learning feels good; our brains reward us for it. That reward contributed to our dominance of as a species. So it’s ironic that we now find ourselves in an environment where the capacity to resist the temptation of our reward may be the primary factor that moves us forward.

]]>http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/the-new-evolution/feed/0The Mobile Opportunityhttp://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/the-mobile-opportunity/
Mon, 06 Jan 2014 02:56:48 +0000http://www.shawnfowler.com/?p=31According to a 2013 report conducted by Adobe, only 7% of business have created a mobile app. 7%. That’s incredibly low. In 2009, I started making apps on the side (before kids and grad school made their way into my life) and even then the marketing opportunity that apps represented to business – especially retailers – was evident. So I’m surprised that so few businesses have taken advantage of it.

Having a mobile app means that your customers carry your brand around in their pocket. When they’re stuck in line at the grocery store, you’re just a fingertip away. When there’s a commercial on during football, you’re there to help them pass the time. And apparently, even when they’re all alone in the bathroom, you’re there to keep them company. What other marketing technology offers that sort of opportunity?

]]>Adults Getting Socialhttp://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/adults-getting-social/
http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/adults-getting-social/#respondSun, 05 Jan 2014 03:55:40 +0000http://www.shawnfowler.com/?p=55The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently released the results of their 2013 study on social media usage among adults. It’s got some pretty interesting stats in it. The biggest finding is that 73% of adults who use the internet also use social networks. And 42% of online adults use more than one social network. That’s a huge number.

What’s probably not surprising is that basically everyone uses Facebook (71%), which is up 4% over 2012. What’s really surprising is the popularity of LinkedIn. At 22%, the study found that it was the second most popular social networking site among adults. Also interesting are the demographics for LinkedIn. LinkedIn users are older, better educated, and more affluent than users of other social networking sites. For comparison, here are the demographics for adult LinkedIn users compared to those for adult Facebook users.

The last really interesting piece is the emergence of Pinterest. At 21%, Pinterest was the third most popular social networking site among adults. And it was also the fastest growing, with a 6% increase in usage over 2012. Additionally, the demographic breakdown was dramatically skewed, with women four times more likely to use Pinterest than men. And like LinkedIn, Pinterest users tend to be more affluent.

]]>http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/adults-getting-social/feed/0Taking Shapehttp://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/taking-shape-2/
http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/taking-shape-2/#respondSat, 04 Jan 2014 05:44:46 +0000http://www.shawnfowler.com/?p=48When I was in college, I decided to take a yoga class. I had some back problems and friends who raved about how much they loved Yoga, so I decided to give it a try. It was terrible. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say I was the worst yogi in the class. Years of lifting weights and running, without the slightest hint of stretching, had left me with very little flexibility. I couldn’t even do the most basic positions.

As I sat there, failing to do the modified pose the instructor had suggested, I looked around at all of the other people in the room. They were exactly what you expect to see when you walk into a Yoga studio. Their bodies contorted. Their faces serene. Their breath calm and deep. Disgusting. “Of course they’re good at Yoga”, I thought. “They look like people who should be good at yoga.” I certainly did not.

Fast forward two years and I’m doing yoga on a daily basis. After rolling up my mat one morning I looked in the mirror and realized that I looked like someone who was good at yoga. Then it hit me. All of those people in that first class looked like they were good at yoga because they did yoga.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that this applies to pretty much everything. Sprinters weren’t born looking like sprinters. They look like that because of all the sprinting. The hands of piano players were shaped by years of playing the piano. Bodybuilders devote their lives to lifting weights for years in order to look like that. And it doesn’t just apply to your physical self. The things you do day in and day out – the things you commit yourself to – shape who you are. You want to be a good writer? Write. You want to be a good sales person? Pick up the phone. Start practicing your pitch. Want to be a good speaker? You’ve got to get in the habit of standing in front of people and giving presentations. You might suck at first. It might be hard. It might be awkward and embarrassing. Almost everything new sucks for the first few weeks. But it’s the only way. No one ever learned to surf from reading a book.

As time goes on, you’ll get better. You’ll get used to the fundamentals. You’ll realize the adjustments that you have to make to get better. And over time, you’ll begin to change. This is the real value in committing yourself to something. When you commit yourself to a course of action – when you commit yourself to mastery of something – you’re giving yourself an opportunity to grow. The superficial changes are the tip of the iceberg. The real value in committing yourself to something lies in the mental and psychological changes that occur in you. Running a marathon is great. Becoming the kind of person who has the discipline to prepare for a marathon is something that carries over to everything else in your life.

I’m not sure if you have a resolution, but whatever it is that you plan to accomplish this year, make sure that you don’t just commit yourself to the goal. Instead, commit yourself to the course of action that will get you there. Commit yourself to the practice. That steady, consistent practice will ultimately shape who you are.

]]>http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/taking-shape-2/feed/0No Sport Focuses on the Audiencehttp://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/if-marketing-is-a-sport-focus-on-the-players-not-the-audience/
http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/if-marketing-is-a-sport-focus-on-the-players-not-the-audience/#respondFri, 03 Jan 2014 02:52:54 +0000http://www.shawnfowler.com/?p=35This post by Kendall Allen in Marketing Land does a great job of highlighting the way technology has increased marketers’ ability to compete. I like the way she phrases it:

Gradually, both brand and performance marketers began to focus more on engagement and maximizing that. This focus has stuck. It’s the way we collectively operate. Making sure that targeting, placement, message and creative all conspire to spur a productive interaction has become the normal obsession — and automation has allowed us to take this to a level that’s almost like sport for marketers. [emphasis mine]

Like a sport! She goes on to discuss the ways that technology makes it possible for marketers to go directly after their competitors, using technologies such as personalization and localization. She’s right on point. Technology has revolutionized the world of marketing. Things that were unimaginable a decade ago are now commonplace. But most marketers don’t really know what to do with that technology. They know that some of these things are possible, but they’re not really sure how to make them happen. We see some really cool examples – often executed by the biggest brands – but your average marketer is often left watching them from the sidelines. Some of this is the result of a lack of technical aptitude/resources/budget. It’s no secret that in hard times, marketing is often the fist thing to get cut. But I think a bigger culprit is to blame. I think it’s because a lot of marketers are still operating in an old paradigm. Allen – the author of the article – seems to even fall prey to this, despite her extensive experience and impressive resume. Specifically, here’s what I’m talking about:

Within digital, as audience-based approaches and programmatic have become the industry standard, mobile has made strides to dive into this opportunity. Now that the data science has matured for mobile and we are no beholden to the cookie, we can explore a greater scope of audience opportunity. Mobile can be a driver and even a lead within the mix, and we can engage in much more competitive tactics.

The stuff she’s talking about is great, with one exception. Audience. She’s right that audience-based approaches have become the industry standard. They are. It’s taken a while to get there, but it seems the entire digital marketing world now recognizes the value of building a well-defined audience. But here’s the thing. Audience marketing is just the application of 1970s direct marketing principles in the digital world. However, technology now exists that enables you to market to the individual. We can now record what customers are doing across devices and platforms, and use that data to drive relevance at the individual level. I’m not just talking about triggering messages based on behavior. I’m talking about harnessing the rich ecosystem available to us as marketers to populate messages with completely relevant content, via the best channel, at the time at which customers are most likely to convert. It’s possible now. The technology exists. But if marketers are still functioning within the audience paradigm, they’re not going to think that way. They’re going to keep trying to be relevant to 100,000 people at a time, which just doesn’t work. So stop. Stop focusing on audiences and start focusing on individuals. So do me a favor, when you click on the link below to read the full article mentally replace the word ‘audience’ with ‘individual.’ And then go win.

]]>http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/if-marketing-is-a-sport-focus-on-the-players-not-the-audience/feed/0Novelty is the key to saleshttp://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/novelty-is-the-key-to-sales/
http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/novelty-is-the-key-to-sales/#respondWed, 01 Jan 2014 20:51:23 +0000http://www.shawnfowler.com/?p=28This HBR blog post from Heidi Grant Halvorson has some great advice on sales. While the post focuses on selling yourself in an interview situation, the advice could probably be used in any sales situation. In short, novelty wins over experience, provided that evidence of quality accompanies the novelty.

Tormala, Jia, and Norton found the same pattern when they looked at evaluations of job candidates. In this case, they compared perceptions of someone with two years of relevant experience who scored highly on a test of leadership achievement, versus someone with no relevant experience who scored highly on a test of leadership potential. (Both candidates had equally impressive backgrounds in every other way). Evaluators believed the candidate with leadership potential would be more successful at the new company than the candidate with a proven record of leadership ability. (Incidentally, if you ask the evaluators to tell you whose resume is more impressive, they agree that it’s the one with experience. They still prefer the other guy anyway.)

I can see a lot of situations in which this could be useful in framing your solution vs. your competitors’. Based on this research, it seems that people naturally gravitate toward something new, so finding a way to position your product that way could give you a leg up. Of course, you need to have accompanying evidence of quality to reassure your buyers. That’s where relevant customer references, case studies, etc. come into play.

]]>http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/novelty-is-the-key-to-sales/feed/0Georgia Ramblerhttp://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/georgia-rambler/
http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/georgia-rambler/#respondSat, 07 Apr 2012 00:27:13 +0000http://www.shawnfowler.com/?p=18Back in my photography days in Athens, my buddy Joe and I used to hop in the car on Saturdays and spend all day on photography excursions. Literally, we would start driving in one direction, take random turns when the whim hit us, and stop to take pictures when we saw something that piqued our interest. You never knew where we would end up. Sometimes it was some random small town in South Carolina or Tennessee, but usually it was the middle of nowhere in Georgia. It was awesome. We got to see so many of the random, forgotten parts of the state and meet incredibly interesting people. We ate great barbeque in a tiny cinder block building that held one folding table and a kitchen. We almost got beat up by a group of guys who thought we were there to steal parts from a field of old, rusted cars that we were photographing. We spent a day eating deep fried snickers and watching men in kilts throw logs at the Georgia Highland Games. I ate some of the best pizza I’ve ever had in Warm Springs, GA after visiting the F.D.R. museum.

We got to see parts of the state, and parts of American life that are often overlooked by the lens of popular culture. So I was excited when, earlier today, I discovered the Georgia Rambler episode of This American Life. Inspired by the column that Charles Salter used to write in the AJC, nine people from the This American Life team came down to random spots in Georgia asking one question; “Who’s the most unforgettable person in this town?’ I’m happy with what they found. Click play below to enjoy it yourself.

]]>http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/georgia-rambler/feed/0The Best Interview Ever?http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/the-best-interview-ever/
http://www.shawnfowler.com/uncategorized/the-best-interview-ever/#respondTue, 07 Feb 2012 12:09:58 +0000http://www.shawnfowler.com/?p=12I’ve seen Stephen Colbert’s interview with Maurice Sendak a couple of times now, and each time I’ve been impressed by its brilliance. Stephen is in top form, and Maurice Sendak conducts himself with the strange combination of sincerity and sarcasm afforded to those with nothing to lose. Make sure you take note of his description of the Wild Rumpus.